The name Sergiu Celibidache brings two questions
to mind: who the heck is he and how do you pronounce it? As with most everything else
about Celibidache, the answer to neither question commands an absolute consensus. His
bizarre habits and refusal to make recordings have stoked a myth of legendary proportions.
Many vaunt him as a genius but others condemn him as a charlatan. Perhaps the one
certainty is that he is the most controversial figure on the classical scene today.

The beginning of Celibidache's career is the
stuff of which dreams are made. Following Germany's defeat, the unknown music student was
catapulted to the helm of the second finest orchestra in Europe; he had just won a contest
to lead a radio ensemble when the temporary conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic was
killed and Celibidache was promoted to its helm. He remained with the orchestra even after
its permanent conductor, the legendary Wilhelm Furtwangler, was finally absolved of
collaboration in 1947 and resumed his career. Although Celibidache apparently refuses to
discuss his years with Furtwangler, early concert recordings show that he clearly absorbed
Furtwangler's mystical passion and icolonoclasm.

Following Furtwangler's death in 1954 and
replacement by Herbert von Karajan, Celibidache permanently severed his relationship with
the Berlin Philharmonic and began a 30-year odyssey. His period as a musical wanderer was
assured by his professional and personal eccentricities. His demands for enormous amounts
of rehearsal time vastly exceeded the resources of commercial orchestras, and so his
activities centered upon heavily-subsidized European radio ensembles. His methods were
abrasive and insulting, reportedly calculating his fee according to the ineptness of the
musicians he would have to tolerate. He considers records to be obscene and after two 1948
Tchaikovsky sessions has refused to set foot in a recording studio (although lately he has
become enamored of videos).

An earlier series of 1960s concerts on the
Italian Arkadia and Hunt CD labels were frustratingly uneven, but among the dross were
enough truly exceptional performances to suggest that Celibidache's unorthodoxy could
produce some fine artistic results. The rarefied playing proved that thorough rehearsal
could impel a provincial ensemble to perform with amazing big-league polish, subtlety and
assurance. And by solving performance problems in extensive rehearsals, Celibidache was
freed during actual performances to craft wayward interpretations that confounded audience
expectations and delighted listeners bored with mainstream approaches to familiar
repertoire.

But even nomads long for a home, and in the 1980s
Celibidache gravitated toward the Munich Philharmonic, of which he ultimately became the
permanent conductor. The association aroused great expectations: after all, if Celibidache
could occasionally stimulate mediocre ensembles to shine, what miracles could he achieve
through continuous leadership of a world-class orchestra? The answer is now on hand,
thanks to two import CD series on Artists Live (distributed by Allegro) and Exclusive
(distributed by Koch).

Consistent with the reputation of their subject,
the presentation of both labels evokes mystery and summons fond memories of pirate LPs.
There are no booklets as such, and the insert cards are nearly bare, giving only the
composer, work, orchestra, concert location and date. The discs themselves add only a
copyright notice. Artwork is minimal and, in the case of Artists Live, downright ugly. But
both editions sell for several dollars less than standard classical imports, and that's a
fair trade-off since most buyers of such obscure stuff already know more than typical
liner notes would convey.

Both series document Celibidache's work with the
Stuttgart Radio (SDR) Orchestra in the early 1980s and the Munich Philharmonic in more
recent years. Both orchestras play far above their slight reputations. The differences
between the playing of the two ensembles is surprisingly small, although the Munich sound
is slightly smoother and more subtly nuanced.

It seems a shame that Celibidache took so long to
alight upon a single orchestra. He is now in his eighties and undoubtedly lacks the years
of focussed energy required to mold an orchestra to the point where it is uniquely
responsive to his special interpretive desires, comparable to the miracles of unanimity
born of decades of work that is heard in the old recordings of Mengelberg with the
Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Furtwangler with the Berlin Philharmonic or Ansermet with the
Suisse Romande. Celibidache's age also suggests that his life-long abhorrence of audio
recordings is unlikely to soften. Therefore, he must be judged by the quality of his
concert tapings.

The discs listed above are the cream of the
latest crop. Of those, the Bruckners are especially fine. Most conductors regard
Bruckner's sprawling structures as highly dramatic juxtapositions of climaxes and repose.
Celibidache, though, blends the peaks and valleys into a continuous emotional flow,
deliberately holding back on summits and refusing to let the calm passages flag. He
achieves this through breathtaking control of his players and an exquisite layering of the
instrumental sounds.

The spellbinding effect is abetted by
Celibidache's extremely slow tempos. Indeed, every one of these performances is the
slowest on record, often by a very substantial margin. Unlike other notoriously
"slow" conductors, though, he takes moderate and fast sections at a standard
pace and only protracts timings that are already deliberate. Bruckner's music is quite
broad to begin with, and under Celibidache's baton is expanded to mesmerizing lengths
where time seems suspended. Thus, the Bruckner Symphony # 4 sprawls to 73 minutes
(compared to 61 minutes for Otto Klemperer, a "slow" Bruckner specialist of the
past) and the Mass # 3 consumes 78 minutes (as compared to a "normal"
hour or so).

These qualities are heard to varying degrees in
all of the present performances. The Bach is deeply felt and yet stylish. Debussy's Afternoon
of a Faun and the slow middle movement of his Iberia are extraordinarily
languorous, evocative and atmospheric. The Franck Symphony manages to integrate its
disparate sections into a seamless whole more successfully than any other known
performance. The Moussorgsky Pictures is taken at an incredibly deliberate 41
minutes, the pace alone converting the normal brisk half-hour tour into a deep meditation.
The Tchaikovsky echoes the seething passion of Bernstein's great 1980s concerts (and
Daniel Barenboim, himself a great admirer of Furtwangler, is a superbly attuned soloist in
the Concerto). The Wagner is perhaps closest to Stokowski's: pure, gorgeous music,
unencumbered by any concern for the operatic dramas in which the excerpts were originally
embedded; the Meistersinger Prelude, in particular, is astoundingly moving.

Beyond these glories, there are SDR performances
of the Beethoven Symphony # 3 (on Artists Live FED 001) and Symphonies #s 5, 6
and 7 (on Exclusive 29/30) and a Munich Symphony # 9 (on Exclusive 15), that
are all fine enough but virtual replicas of Furtwangler's monumental final readings. There
are also a Dvorak Symphony # 7 (on Artists Live FED 040), a Faure Requiem
(on Exclusive 52) and a set of the Schumann Symphonies (on Artists Live FED 009/10)
which are excellent but not uniquely insightful. Perhaps the only outright failure is a
Schumann Piano Concerto (on Artists Live FED 027, with fellow iconoclast Arturo
Benedetti Michelangeli), which comes across as more lumbering than inspired and far less
probing than the same artists' 1967 outing on Arkadia CDHP 592.1; the coupling, though, is
a ravishing Strauss Four Last Songs with soprano Jessye Norman.

Recording quality is quite good except for the
Beethoven Symphony # 9, which sounds like it was forced through a defective dynamic
treble control that muffles and badly distorts the soft passages. Audience noise generally
is suppressed to an inconspicuous level, although the beginning of the Bruckner Mass
is so cough-infested that it has more pathological than musical value. During several
performances, Celibidache can be heard verbally exhorting the players toward a climax or
making a percussive noise, but unlike Glenn Gould and Pablo Casals, two notorious grunters
of the past, Celibidache's unwitting additions to the scores are in exact rhythm, on key
and only barely distracting.

Common wisdom is that the unique flame of
nineteenth century interpretive freedom was extinguished with the death of Stokowski at
the age of 95 in 1977. In Celibidache, though, more than a flicker remains. Although born
in 1912, Celibidache's probing insight transcends mere peculiarity to recall an art of the
past that is still being created afresh by this bizarre but wonderful musician. Those
collectors who properly yawn at the prospect of a well-worn score in yet another routine
performance, indistinguishable from dozens of others, can only hope that the stunning
Celibidache concerts available to date are but the start of a huge and intriguing schedule
of future releases. Whether these readings are definitive or "the best" is
entirely beside the point; they are unique and nowadays that in itself makes them
irreplaceably valuable.

And so, to answer the first of our two questions:
Celibidache is the supreme genius among living conductors. As for the second: the
consensus seems to be Chell-ee-bee-DAY-chee. But not everyone seems to agree with that
either.